Dynamo and bomb.
—EMIL NACHAHMER
Artifacts from Heaven
“Thunderbolts of God”—from England to Japan and from Norway to Africa, that was how men once explained the stone axes and arrowheads which they found buried in the earth. The philosophers and scientists of the Renaissance dug a little deeper, and one of them came up with the verbose and remarkable suggestion that these stones were made “by an admixture of a certain exhalation of thunder and lightning with metallic matter, chiefly in dark clouds, which is coagulated by the circumfused moisture and conglutinated into a mass (like flour with water), and subsequently indurated by heat, like a brick.”[1] Some found a simpler explanation: these artifacts were iron tools petrified by time. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Michele Mercati, physician to Pope Clement VIII, saw the truth: “They have been broken off from hard flints by a violent blow, in the days before iron was employed for the follies of war; for the earliest men had only splinters of flint for knives.”[2] The English historian William Dugdale said much the same thing in Antiquities of Warwickshire. The theory was not generally accepted, however, until the Spaniards found American Indians making arrowheads and stone axes without the aid of thunder, lightning, or God.
The Folsom Point—Unique and Potent
Quite a different thunderbolt—and a potent one—was the spear point that J. D. Figgins, of the Denver Museum of Natural History, found in 1927 between the ribs of an extinct bison near Folsom, New Mexico. It was a thunderbolt that destroyed, startlingly and for all time, thirty years of opposition to the presence of early man in the Americas.
A spear point, or possibly a scraper, found near Trenton, New Jersey, in 1872. Except for lack of retouching on the edges, it resembles the Mousterian point on [page 90], but it is a little longer—5¾ inches. This implement was found on the surface, but it was said to be identical with some discovered with human bones in the glacial gravel beds below. (After Abbott, 1872.)
This was not the first discovery of a point with the peculiar “fluting” illustrated on pages [147] and [148]. Figgins had found one at Folsom in 1926, but its provenience had been denied. Koch may have found one under a mastodon in 1839. Certainly the Smithsonian Institution acquired in 1893 a fluted point that was picked up in New Hampshire, and other specimens have been discovered in old collections. But, in spite of the fact that these points were very odd in shape and had never been found in the Old World, scientists had paid little attention to them until 1927.
